Yesterday's Tomorrow (excerpt)
by slillie2
Summary: Because there are no bad people, just bad decisions. Clarke sees this first hand on the Arc with the Council and on the ground with the Grounders and the Mountain Men. But maybe she's got it backwards. Maybe there are no good people or good decisions. As the future and Past collide, Clarke realizes that the world exists in shades of Gray.


**Disclaimer: I do not own anything. The 100 belongs to The CW.**

 **Yesterday's Tomorrow**

She sighed as she rubbed more charcoal onto the walls of her too bright, too white room. She should have felt angered, or frightened, she knew, but she was numb. She took another breath of stale air as she looked around her barren room, a cell really, and found comfort in the pictures she had drawn onto the wall. They were primarily landscapes, images of what she imagined the ground would look like on the Earth, images that, if all went well, she might actually see in person very soon. She should have at least felt excited about the prospect of setting foot on a planet that no one had been on in over a hundred years. Hell, she should have been angry. She knew that being "chosen" to go to Earth was essentially a death sentence, one her own mother had chosen to subject her to. So yes, in reality, if she had to choose an emotion Clarke probably would have settled on anger, or fear, or sadness, but she was empty. The months she had spent in solitary, isolated from everyone else had worn down upon her so that all she felt was a growing sense of hopelessness that eventually settled into nothingness.

She leaned her back against the metal wall and took in the scene she had drawn on the floor. She smiled at the forest she had drawn, the calm pond, the cloudless sky. It was perfect really, she was impressed by how well she was able to capture shadows in the grays of the charcoal, and normally the picture would fill her with a sense of peace, of acceptance. She might very well see a forest for real in the near future. Instead it filled her with a sense of loneliness. Her pictures lacked any humans or animals, they were landscapes alright-barren landscapes. That was what she imagined awaiting her on earth, an empty planet. One destroyed by humans. Red blooded people just like her, had developed weapons that could destroy the world.

Over the years as she grew up and began to realize what had happened to the planet, she had wondered what had driven these people to eliminate their own species, and she had yet to come up with an answer. Despite what had happened to her, despite how she was treated over the last few months, Clarke could not fathom the destruction of an entire species. She refused to believe that people were inherently bent on destruction and built upon a foundation of hate. Despite what she had seen in Council politics, despite what her best friend had done to her father, and despite what was going to happen to her, she refused to believe that people were bad. Her father used to say that there were no bad people, just bad decisions, and she believed him. She had often wondered if he regretted his decision, did he see it as a bad decision even though it was done with good intent? The Council had decided that it was a bad decision, did that make her father a bad man? Clarke didn't think so, she had thought of her dad as a hero, he was trying to do the right thing. And yet, they had sentenced him to death. Her mother had said that her father was right, that what he had done was good, and yet he had been executed anyway. Her mother had told her that Clarke had done nothing wrong, and yet she was in prison about to be sent to a planet that for all intents and purposes was a death trap.

Clarke brushed a strand of pale blonde hair from her eyes. She had accidentally smeared some charcoal across her face, but was too for invested in her drawings to care about wiping it off. Her shirt clung to her body with sweat, even though it was freezing in the prison sector. She was lying. She believed that if she told herself something enough times she would come to believe it. So she had told herself that she did not care what happened to her, but in truth she was petrified. She had told herself that there were no bad people, just bad decisions, but really she believed that everyone was bad, and there just weren't any good decisions. She hadn't tried to tell people the truth about the Arc because it was the right thing to do, she had tried to prevent her father's death, and failed. She had tried to gain his freedom, and instead she only succeeded in securing her own imprisonment and a one trip ticket to Earth.

She looked out of the window of her cell, the planet she was going to looked right back. It was beautiful. And if she had colors she would have loved to have drawn it, but there was no way she would be able to do the globe of blues and greens and whites justice with just black and grays. She gave a huff as she plopped down on the floor. She was so tired of gray, at least on the ground there'd be color. It almost made certain death bearable...almost.

The door to her cell was slid open, and three heavily armed men appeared.

"It's time." The one in the center said.

I am not afraid. Clarke thought, allowing herself this one last lie, before all sensible thoughts were swallowed up in a pit of fear. She slowly rose onto shaking legs as the two men on either side of the one who had spoken, each stepped forward and grasped one of her arms and led her towards the door. Her heart was pounding, her palms were sweating, her breath was gasping. She was panicking. She gave an animalistic cry as she drove her elbow into the stomach of the man on her right, and raked her nails down the face of the man on her left. I don't want to go, she thought desperately, I don't want to go. It wasn't until much later that Clarke would realize she was shouting those words.

The third man stepped forward, a batton raised in his hand. His face was hard, his eyes were ice. He was going to make sure she ended up on Earth, one way or another. He took a step towards her, and Clarke took one back, her eyes shifting-desperately searching for a way out. But all she saw was gray. Gray walls. Gray floors. Gray doors. Gray. Gray. Gray.

"There's nowhere to go, Clarke."

She gave a startled jump and turned to face her mother's voice. Her eyes found her mother just as the third man grabbed her arm, twisting it behind her back.

"Mom!" Clarke cried out. She did not know it she was relieved or frightened, but at this point she did not care. Her mom was here, she would not allow these men to send her to her death.

But Clarke's hope was short lived, as Abigail Griffin did nothing to stop the man from leading her only daughter towards the door that would lead to the transport going to Earth. Clarke tried not to let her mother's reaction hurt her, but it felt like someone had just shattered her glass heart.

"Why?" She rasped out desperately.

"It's the only way I could keep you alive."

Clarke gave a laugh that was more of a bark. "Keep me alive? You're sending me to my death. You're sending all of us to our deaths. Do you even care?"

"Of course I care," Abby replied, "The Earth is the best chance you have at living."

"Why? Because some man finally showed up after fifty years and told you so? Because you've finally got the machine to work? You don't know where it'll send us. We could end up on the Earth fifty million years in the past, or maybe we'll arrive just in time to see the planet blow up, or maybe the planet is still so radioactive that we'll be dead in the first five minutes."

"How do you know about the machine?" Abby asked.

"I'm about to die, and all you care about is how I know about the time machine?" Clarke asked incredulously.

"Clarke, listen to me," her mother said as she reached forward and grabbed her daughter, "you can't tell anyone about this."

She scoffed, "Keeping secrets still? We could end up eaten by dinosaurs! But all you care about is keeping secrets."

"You won't end up eaten by dinosaurs. It doesn't work that way. You don't know what you're talking about."

"Just tell me this, was Dad right? Is the Arc running out of air?" When her mother didn't respond she continued, "It seems to me that the Council should maybe focus on fixing that problem before they start looking to old science fiction novels in order to save the human race. Time travel? Really Mom? Your machine will probably expose us to more radiation than the Earth will, and we'll have all died for nothing."

"Clarke," Abby sighed.

"I'm not trying to tell you to not send me to Earth. Fine, send me and the other kids. Whatever. I'm just saying that even if what you say is true. Even if there is a time machine that can send us back to earth when the radiation is no longer a problem, how are you going to get everyone on the Arc back onto Earth? I don't think you can." When her mother didn't respond, she continued, "And I think you know that. The people you send to Earth are just supposed to buy the Council more time to figure out how to get everyone to the machine, but it's a waste of time, Mom. Dad wouldn't have mentioned the Arc running out of resources if he believed your machine would work. He was the head engineer he would have known about it," she had come up with this idea during her months in solitary, "he would have known that there was no way to save everyone, he was trying to get us to think of a solution to the air problem, not create more issues with the notion of time travel."

"It's not a notion."

"What?"

"The time travel," Abby explained, "it works, we've just never been able to sync up the years before. We've sent people through...with no idea where they ended up."

"When you floated people." Clarke said slowly, "you never sent them out the airlock, instead you sent them through time."

"It works Clarke. The guy in the hospital came from the Earth. Marcus has been working with a mechanic on getting the machine to zero in on the timeline this man came from. He was from Earth, Clarke. Don't you get it? You can survive there."

"You don't know that for sure. Dad told me that the man died of radiation exposure. You could be sending us to our deaths. Is that what that is for?" She asked gesturing towards the silver cuff her mother held in her hands.

"It'll monitor your vitals."

"To let you know if the planet is still radioactive." Clarke said with a nod. "You don't know this will work. You just hope that it does."

"This is the right thing to do Clarke." Abby said as she put the cuff on her daughter.

"It still doesn't change the fact that this is a bad decision." Clarke's lips twitched up in a small semblance of a smile as she saw her mother flinch. At least her father had tried to make a good decision, her mother was just settling for the better of two bad decisions

 **AN:**

 **This is just an except from the first chapter. I plant to have the first chapter done by Friday, and hopefully have updates (at least) every Friday. But this story gets a bit complicated with timelines, and I'm going slow to keep all the plot points in line. The story has already changed and expanded from the original idea (it was originally just a oneshot, which some characters that aren't even in the story until like chapter 5). Yes, this story has time travel, and working out the rules for this particular brand of time travel has been fun (and frustrating), but I'm excited for this story.**


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